The Fall of Eagles: the end of political empires in Wales

Desmond Clifford

A case could be made for describing Labour in Wales – I can no longer bring myself to call it “Welsh Labour” – as democracy’s most successful political party.

Its capture of the majority of Welsh parliamentary seats at the election of 1922, only two decades after Keir Hardy won that first seat in Merthyr, began 100 years of unbroken victories.

Back then, Labour was the new and dynamic force representing working people in the age of universal suffrage (from 1928) as state power expanded and the welfare system took shape.

Wales had previously been a stronghold for the Liberal Party which, in 1906, won 35 of 36 seats. Labour swooped and stole their lunch, practically every last crumb of it, prefiguring Reform’s challenge now to the Conservatives as the monopoly voice on the right.

1922 was also the year Lloyd George fell from office – he’d been kept in power by Conservatives rather than Liberals – and after that no Liberal held office in Whitehall again until Nick Clegg buddied up with David Cameron in 2010.

In twentieth-century Westminster elections the Conservatives were expelled from Wales twice, like bookends, in 1906 and 1997.  The surprise is that they did so well in between.

Wales was structurally inhospitable to Conservatives with a limited middle class, an industrialised workforce and predominantly Nonconformist communities.

Westminster’s first-past-the-post system wasn’t kind to Tories but even here they surged strongly from time to time, in the 1980s and again, as recently as 2019, they scooped 14 out of 40 seats.

While never remotely a majority cause, Conservatism has solid support which was occluded by Labour’s phenomenal historical strength in industrial Wales.

The Senedd’s proportional system gave the Conservatives a new lease of electoral life.

It was they, not Plaid Cymru, who formed the Official Opposition for most of the Senedd’s history. This was true as recently as the Senedd’s last election in 2021 and Darren Millar goes into this election campaign as outgoing leader of the opposition. If he returns, it certainly won’t be on that basis.

It looks like the Conservatives will be eviscerated at this election. The main factor, obviously, is the dramatic rise of Reform and the wholesale transfer of voting intentions on the right in their favour.

But the Welsh Conservatives have connived with their own downfall. Their early leader in the Senedd, Nick Bourne, having opposed devolution in 1997, made a good fist of trying to help make it work in practice.

He represented the Conservative interest positively, with moderation, and the voice of Tory voters was present in political dialogue.

After he lost his Senedd seat, it was all downhill for the Conservatives, even when they did well at the ballot box.

Andrew R.T. Davies led them down a rabbit hole from which they never emerged, locked into a rhetoric increasingly poisonous and alienating to everyone outside his narrow channel. Good quality moderate members like David Melding and Angela Burns were hemmed in and neutralised.

Peter Fox, the former leader of Monmouthshire Council, arrived too late in the Senedd to impose himself.

A squad of potential Tory Young Turks were elected to the Senedd in 2021. For a while they looked promising.  They should have rallied behind one of their number and mounted a palace coup against the old guard to give themselves, and some new ideas, a chance. Instead, they sleepily allowed Darren Miller to succeed Andrew RT Davies and offer much of the same. Only Reform was doing it better.

Essentially, Conservatives in the Senedd dipped themselves in batter, jumped in the deep frier and served themselves up on a plate with chips and ketchup for Reform UK.

In the first devolution election in 1999 the Liberal Democrats won a respectable 10% of seats.  They formed a now forgotten coalition government to float Rhodri Morgan’s first administration; Mike German served as Deputy First Minister.

Kamikaze mission

In 2007 they had the chance to form a “Rainbow Coalition” with the Conservatives and Plaid Cymru in a historic attempt to wrest power from Labour. It was the Lib Dems, on a kamikaze mission, who collapsed the deal at the last minute.

It was their best and last chance to be relevant and establish themselves as a party of government, and they blew it. Afterwards voters concluded, correctly based on the evidence, that there was just no point voting for them.

Kirsty Williams was eventually the lone survivor and joined Carwyn Jones’ last administration as Education Minister. She was miles better at politics than most of her Labour cabinet colleagues. Had she chosen Labour, rather than the Lib Dems, she would have become leader and First Minister, probably after Carwyn Jones.

Going into the election Jane Dodds carries a lonely torch against bleak prospects. She switched from Labour to the Lib Dems at an early stage in her political career, abandoning a sinking ship for a leaky life raft as it turned out.

She is a sensible, humane voice in the Senedd and would be a loss to it.

The Lib Dems won a single Welsh seat at the Westminster election and the Liberal tradition in Wales refuses to have a stake drive through its heart – but like the hanged vagrant on the medieval roadside, they stand as warning to Labour that long-term electoral dominance is no guide to future success.

Labour’s dominance of Wales has been so long-lasting and so complete that it’s hard to conceive what the political world without them looks like.

It isn’t only ministers and Senedd members but the local authorities they control, the public appointments, the third sector they’ve built and paid for; the client base is huge.

The direct and indirect patronage of the Welsh Government – any government for that matter – is vast and, in Wales, coloured to match the Labour Party.

This has been achieved not through corrupt practice but through the long-term accretion of uninterrupted power. This will take a generation to unwind and recast.

Community loyalties

Labour might still do better than their worst polls have suggested. They’ve been a force for a hundred years and have resources and structures, and community loyalties, which won’t evaporate overnight (in Russia the Communist Party still routinely picks up twenty per cent of the vote!).

It’s not impossible they could be in the mix for talks with Plaid Cymru on government, whether on a formal coalition basis or through less formal co-operation. Either way, if they can bring influence to bear, they should; power is almost always the best option when it’s available.

On a worst-case outcome, Labour could be a seriously depleted rump with no real influence at all.

On the one side, where the word “Welsh” used to appear before “Labour”, they are squeezed by Plaid Cymru and, on the other, by the Greens who have fast emerged as the radical option for those disillusioned by Labour since Corbyn’s departure.

One of Starmer’s advisers was reported as saying such people had nowhere to go other than Labour.

Well, it turns out they have.

Polls suggest our politics is changing into multi-party blocks.  On the centre-left, Plaid is emerging as the lode star with Labour, Greens and Lib Dems forming a social democratic comet tail.

On the right, Reform is usurping the Tories but together, if there are any Tories left, they will form a right-wing block in the Senedd.

Rebranding

Whether this election is a revolution in Welsh politics, or a rebranding exercise, remains to be seen.

Will Plaid Cymru initiate an energetic Wales-first approach to government and shift the dial on key issues? Or will it be a reheated version of Morgan-Jones-Drakeford Welsh Labour 2.0 with a better logo?

If Reform forms a government, will it have any viable answers to Wales’ problems or will it sink, after the realities of government become apparent, into chaotic do-nothing-much defeatism which is the experience in several of the English local authorities they control?

In other words, is there a danger that Plaid simply replaces Labour, and Reform replaces the Conservatives, but everything else ticks along substantially as before? If that’s what happens, where do disillusioned voters take their disillusionment next?

Democracy is about choice and performance. No party has a right to continued support forever. Bolton Wanderers and Preston North End were great clubs while Manchester City and Liverpool were nothing much. Empires rise and fall. Britain once ruled a quarter of the planet, now it can barely organise a ship to sail to Cyprus.

Things fall apart, the world turns, eagles fall, republics rise.